School buses and Coke

School buses. There is nothing quite like an American school bus. I don’t know why they have to be that colour, but it’s cool. Maybe they found people just didn’t spot them unless they were big, yellow and with lots of stop signs attached.

After a few days on holiday in America, the school buses became a bit of an obsession with me. I just had to get a good photo of one. Australian school buses are just plain buses, so it would be just as much a postcard as a piccy of the Grand Canyon.

At first I couldn’t snap one. They’d be past before I got the camera out. They taunted me. Until we stopped in the little town of Jerome, Arizona (proud to announce the arrival of the town’s first bank machine), and I snapped one coming down the main street. Of course, once I got my photo, I’d see fleets of them everywhere – typical, eh? But it didn’t matter – I had my picture of the big yellow school bus.

The USA is one of the last countries still to hold out to metric. Imperial measurements rule. There is nothing more confusing than to attempt to buy a drink that’s 12 fl oz, when you not only don’t know how much a fl oz is, you don’t even know what it stands for. I got by though – I’d just look at the sizes on offer and choose the middle one. That way I knew I wouldn’t be getting anything pathetically small or ridiculously big.

But I get the feeling that metric is sneaking in… it’s taking over by stealth. It’s on the stuff that nobody reads – the nutrition information. Well, almost, the energy/fat (it’s energy if you use it, it’s fat if you don’t) is in calories instead of kilojoules.

There was one other thing measured in metric, something that I didn’t expect. Coke bottles. Yep, the ol’ two litre bottle of Coke is alive and well in the USA. But the cans are [some amount of fl oz] that brings them out at only 355ml! Ripped off! No wonder I still felt thirsty after drinking a can of Coke; I was 20ml short of quenching my thirst! Americans! Rise up! March on the streets! Demand your 20ml of Coke!